Obituary: David Rockefeller died on March 20th

WHEREVER he went in the world—and in his 35 years at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles—David Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own solitary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few people saw.

Networks, part-public, part hidden, were his speciality. As a Rockefeller, whose millions had bolstered Rockefeller University and the Rockefeller Centre and whose Picassos, Matisses and Cézannes filled the Museum of Modern Art, he was a fixture on the New York social, cultural and political scene. He did great things for the city, helping to revive Lower Manhattan and to build the World Trade Centre; while also holding its feet to the fire, during its bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, by demanding savage budget cuts and the sacking of thousands of workers. From his first job, as secretary to Fiorello La Guardia, every mayor of New York was drawn into his net.

His gaze went much further, however. As an international banker, he strove to give Chase a presence in every corner of the world. Some regimes were risky, to be sure. Some were bloodstained. But if a loan could be carefully crafted and secured, it should be offered. At times, his dogged diplomacy made openings where State Department officials hardly dared to tread. He forged banking deals with Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union and Zhou Enlai in China, as well as with more amenable leaders in every continent except Antarctica. For the sake of “balance” for Chase in the Middle East, he buttered up both Israel and the Arabs. Fidel Castro once bounded across a room, to his embarrassment, to shake his hand.

Capitalism, American-style, was in his view a gift to the world as well as the grease of his career. The lure of profit created jobs and wealth, and empowered people, as no other system could. No one, therefore, should feel guilty about making money. Certainly “Senior” had not. The grand old man, John D., who sometimes shared his breakfast oatmeal with him, had felt no remorse about dominating the market when he ran Standard Oil. He made his millions but, as a good Baptist, gave away a tenth of it. Young David and his siblings, each heir to a trust containing $16m, were taught that great wealth conferred responsibility. He began by taking Thanksgiving baskets to the poor of New York, toiling up cabbage-reeking stairways with his liveried chauffeur by his side.

Old-money manners

He was often offered jobs in public service: treasury secretary, head of the Fed, ambassador to here and there. Both Republican and Democratic presidents asked him; as a moderate Republican of the old (now vanished) style, hating profligacy but with a social conscience, he might have served either. Yet his east-coast old-money manners, and his natural reserve, inclined him to be useful in the private sector. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war, when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was really going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.

At Chase, which he headed from 1969 to 1981, he continued the habit of covert operations. His early years there were difficult; he was not considered a “real banker”, had not been through their credit training programme and did not speak their language. Stymied at first in his efforts to expand overseas, but wishing to preserve civility and avoid confrontation, he set up semi-secret planning groups to steer the bank in that direction. A stumble in the mid-1970s saw a steep fall in earnings and a fat portfolio of non-performing loans. This was blamed on his internationalism; but for that he would never apologise.

Far from it. He was proud to be part of the so-called “secret cabal” that wanted a more integrated global structure, with America at the head of it. This was both in the country’s interest, and its moral obligation. At the Council on Foreign Relations, at Bilderberg meetings, or on the Trilateral Commission which he founded in 1973, he relished discussing world affairs with people of equal quality and influence from North America, Europe and Asia. Their exclusiveness led many people to think these talking shops sinister, or an undisclosed tunnel to power. He found them just an invaluable way of linking the likeminded.

In all these efforts, he hoped the Rockefeller name would push matters forward. He never thought it a hindrance, though he was sad to note that for a time his children disowned it. With that name he was more apt to get through to people on the telephone. And in order to make his calls, he had amassed a second collection after the Coleoptera at Pocantico Hills: a Rolodex containing 150,000 names, eventually electronic, but originally on cards with handwritten notes of date and place. It was so large that it had its own office, beside his, in the Rockefeller Centre. From that room, his networks crept out to span the world.